“Ken White speaks in swerve and thistle, thinks in hinges, muscles a touch of molasses into his syntax to flex the metronome. This is dazzle. These are necessary jostlings, tangled thick in coursing minutes, intercourses. Here, texture and reference are overlapped concerns, as artifice and blankness are both garmented and undressed: lovers, a beast, contemporary Los Angeles. We hunger for these racings — to be disguised, to be revealed, to jump leagues, to be in thrall.”—Richard Siken, author of Crush and War of the Foxes
The Getty Fiend, a contemporary medieval melodrama set in Los Angeles’s Getty Museum, takes the reader on a tour filled with rock stars and warrior-kings, werewolves and archivists, sartorial Huns and libertine saints, all seen through the keenly dramatic flair of a collector’s eye. A cinematic and labyrinthine take on pulp horror, Ken White’s screenplay-in-verse is a monster mash-up of forms and languages, facades and carnal catastrophes, archaic languages and misplaced rhetorics — a campy, fantastical gender-bending transformation into the inadvertently divine.
This title is released as an open access second edition as part of punctum’s Special Collections project.
Ken White is a poet and screenwriter. He co-wrote and co-produced the feature film Winter in the Blood, co-directed and co-wrote the short film Universal VIP, as well as directed and co-wrote the short film The Conservationist. He has written or co-written more than a dozen feature scripts, including Blight, The Wereman, The Sorrows, and Cullen’s Hound, as well as new scripts, The Orpheum Circuit, The Jennet Device, and a television pilot, LIT, with James Meetze, and most recently the psychological horror feature Wed the Dark, which he directed. White is the author of three books of poetry: Eidolon, The Getty Fiend, and Middlemost Constantine. His work has appeared in The Boston Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Omniverse, Manor House Quarterly, Versal, Spork, Horsethief, EuropeNow, Poets.org, and BOMB Magazine, among others. White is an Assistant Professor of Screenwriting at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.
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